KLM are currently the undisputed champions of using social media to drive engagement. They won our Best Airline in Social Media award last year, have one of the Best Facebook Timelines, allow you to sit next to your Facebook friend, and even dress up like one of their flight attendants! Their VP of eCommerce says that airline marketing is up for an overhaul, and they’re leading the way. But we all know they put a lot of time, people and money behind their efforts (see study).

So, if you had one tenth the resources that KLM has and no budget, what can you learn from them to drive insane engagement? Play destination hangman with your Facebook fans! It’s similar to what you played as a kid in school, just featuring your airline’s destinations. Simple!

We had recently shared that one of the best Facebook Engagement strategies is “Fill in the blank”. Destination hangman is like putting this strategy on steroids!

How does it work? Let’s see how KLM does it. It’s a simple three step process:

Put up a nice photo of one of your destinations on your Facebook wall
In the caption, ask people to guess …

Since recently returning from the American Association of Airport Executive’s (Great Lakes Region) National Air Service Conference, my mind is buzzing about innovative ways that social media can be used to enhance an airport’s air service development efforts.

At the conference I moderated a panel that was focused on the importance of communicating to the generations and how social media has infiltrated into the air service spectrum of the industry. It is now more important than ever for airports to understand that the ways in which our passengers are communicating and understand that that has evolved to include social media. It is no longer enough to simply market a new route through traditional mediums;  social media needs to be at the forefront of the minds of airports as they are working to enhance air service.
Social Promotions and Route Launches
During the conference session, Justin Meyer, Manager of Air Service Development for the Kansas City International Airport shared how social media is not only changing the way the airport is communicating to passengers of all generations, but also about their recent efforts to launch new service on Alaska Airlines from MCI to Seattle, WA.  The airport had a pre-existing …

Editor’s Note: Here’s another guest post by Peter Claridge of Unmetric, an exclusive aviation partner of SimpliFlying. Unmetric is a social media benchmarking company that helps brands analyse how well they’re doing on social media by including in-depth insights into numerous metrics as well as information on what kind of content “works” and how competitors are faring. Among Unmetric’s list of illustrious clients are Citibank, Nestlé and AirTel.

In many respects, Facebook takes the limelight when it comes to looking at how an airline is engaging with the community. However, over the past couple of years Twitter has inadvertently become the public helpdesk for brands around the world. Many airlines have been quick to establish a presence here to ensure that where ever there are questions and praise (and to some extent, complaints) a representative is there is respond in 140 characters.

US airlines, like many other US brands, have been quick to build their Twitter teams and are blazing a trail for many other global airlines to follow. SimpliFlying and Unmetric decided to dig a little deeper using the Unmetric platform to see if there is a clear leader or whether all airlines are doing a similar job. We collected and analyzed the …

Note: This article was first published as a Guest Post on Tnooz.

Those of us who work with Facebook Pages are already used to the incessant changes that Facebook has introduced over the years.

However, many were startled after the latest change was announced.

When Facebook finally decided to unveil its new Timeline for company pages, they gave page owners (marketers, to be more specific) a whole new playing field with lots of new tools and only 30 days to adapt and adopt the new format.

For those who had already prepared long-term plans for Facebook marketing at the beginning of the year, this radical change must have made their familiar football pitch appear like an ice-skating rink during the half-time break.

Admittedly, Facebook is trying to make things easier by allowing page admins to preview the new look of their pages before the new design goes live for everyone without exception.

The countdown is well underway and on March 30 all Fan Pages will be converted, permanently, to the new Timeline.

With such a slew of changes and new features being introduced with this update, it would be advisable to review all critical aspects of the transition before moving to Timeline.

To make this …

Even though it seems like yesterday, our popular top 10 initiative has reached its first birthday and we’ve decided to celebrate it with a king-size slide deck featuring the best case studies from our past top 10s.

This top 50 has been designed not only to celebrate the first birthday of the SimpliFlying’s Top 10s but also to provide our readers with a unique downloadable resource that features what we think are the very best marketing initiatives put forward by airlines and airports over the past few years.
An idea-generating tool
However we do not wish this top 50 to be a sort of “museum” of past initiatives but rather a tool for airline professionals to generate new ideas. We hope that by viewing such a wide variety of outstanding initiatives in a single slide deck, other marketers will be inspired to create other new and innovative campaigns that will form the basis of future SimpliFlying Top 10s.

You will notice that each case study has a category indicator before its title. These indicators refer to the original top 10 that featured that particular case study, and have been included  to facilitate further research into the subject.
A year of top 10s
The list below provides links …

The guys at KLM just don’t rest, do they? Over the past year or two, they’ve churned out some of the most excellent social media initiatives designed to delight and engage customers while ensuring that they’re firmly in sight of ultimate business objectives such as driving revenue and loyalty as well.

KLM is well known for its social media initiatives, but the speed and quality of their campaigns is really starting to become something unique. Just a few days ago we reported about their “Meet and Seat” social-seating initiative and now they’ve surprised us again by creating a fun, and very shareable, initiative that will surely help create new positive associations with their brand. Read on:
Ever dreamed of becoming a stewardess? Or of dressing up as one?
Well, personally I haven’t, but since it’s Carnival, I decided to accept a fun assignment by trying out KLM’s latest initiative: their “Stewardress Yourself“ Facebook app. Eventually, I ended up taking some rather embarrassing (but admittedly entertaining) pictures of me as a SimpliStewardess.

The initiative has been launched trough a dedicated tab in KLM’s facebook page that houses a unique Facebook app designed to bring customers even closer to the brand. This is how …

It might seem like an anxious start to the new year for AirAsia X, which recently announced that it would be introducing a daily KL-Sydney service and terminating all its flights to Europe and India. Far from being in the doldrums, it’s all part of the airline’s strategy to refocus and strengthen its brand, as its CEO Azran Osman-Rani shared with SimpliFlying in our latest airline strategy podcast.

Listen to the exclusive podcast below.

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(c) 2012 SimpliFlying Podcasts

Note: The HTML5 player above should work with most modern browsers including those in mobile devices such as the iPad and iPhone. However, if you’re having trouble playing the file, please use the flash player at the bottom of this post. Please also note that the podcast above has only a snippet of the interview with Azran. To delve deeper into the mind of …

Update: The campaign has been featured on Facebook Studio and also shortlisted for the Shorty Awards!
Airlines these days are chasing the elusive return on social media. And while the number of “likes” or “followers” and video views are all the rage, it’s ultimately the return on investment (ROI) that matters the most. About a year ago, AAdvantage ran possibly the most viral Facebook campaign for an airline – fans grew almost 100X in just 54 hours. But ROI numbers were not necessarily as impressive.
Now, COPA Airlines from Panama has numbers to prove a 50X ROI from their recent Facebook app – an effort for which Diego Quesada Grimaldo, their eCommerce Director, was nominated for the SimpliFlying Heroes Award last month!

Pasaporte America to promote destinations
To promote its network in the Americas, COPA recently held a Passport America sweepstakes, asking the public to tell the airline which 10 destinations they’d like to visit first if they were the winner. Participants could explore each of COPA Airlines’ 59 destinations on the map, and then select their favourite 10. One person won a trip for two to all of COPA’s 59 destinations.

The Facebook-centric campaign (app no …

The past year has been an interesting and very successful one for Simpliflying with a number of new client acquisitions and tons of exciting free resources such as infographics and Top 10 case-packs posted regularly to the blog amongst other things. At the brink of the new year, we relive ten of the most popular articles on SimpliFlying in 2011:

10. Social seating: Have you read about the Malaysian Airline initiative that led the airline to create a much talked about Facebook booking engine that allowed people to sit with their friends on the airline’s flights?

9. Airports in social media: In the ninth place we have a Top 10 case-pack, an initiative helmed by our Senior Innovation Officer Shubhodeep Pal, on how airports have driven engagement trough social media.

8. Blockbuster social initiative: Next, in 8th place we find one, if not the, most successful social media campaigns of 2011, the AA Advantage “mystery miles” campaign that hit the headlines in February by achieving an 84 fold growth of its Facebook fans in 54 hours.

7. Airline Twitter initiatives: In the seventh place we find …

If you still need proof of whether social media matters or not, you only have to look at the turnout for this year’s votes for the 2nd SimpliFlying Awards for Social Media Excellence. By the time voting closed after 2 weeks of stiff competition, more than 30,000 votes had been submitted from over 4500 cities. And this was after having shortlisted the Top Nominees from close to 60 nominations. The finalists for each category have been announced and they’ll face off in Amsterdam on October 10.

The innovations begin

When airlines initially began their adventure on the socialscape, it was all about about feeling their way about on the social platforms of their choice. The primary focus at the outset was first, discovering how to drive traffic and building a fan-base, followed by the more important aim of utilizing the platform for customer engagement and provide them a real-time medium of information-dissemination and customer service. Slowly, however, they realized that social platforms could also aid them in driving revenue. Flash sales, deals and contests became popular to attract more customers. However, the real innovations were still some time away.

A changing landscape

That time, it seems, has …